Happy Holidays. I hope all of you are able to take some time off to visit friends and family.

This will be my last post of 2009, as I will be on vacation for the rest of December. Today, I wanted to share some news and then comment on the current and future development of this blog.

John Resig speaks at Yahoo! BayJax meetup

Testing, Performance Analysis, and jQuery 1.4One of the most prolific contributors to open source web development, John Resig explains how to test your JavaScript applications and improve performance. He uses his experience with jQuery to explain how testing has helped dramatically improve the performance of version 1.4. I recommend watching the video, as it will making testing your JavaScript code easier and better.

MySQL Oracle

Oracle Publicly Commits to MySQLThe merger of Oracle and Sun has left developers wondering about MySQL, and whether it will remain free and widely available. In response to the community outcry, Oracle has promised to support MySQL for at least the next five years. This is good news, because MySQL is the most widely used database technology. I only hope we can convince Oracle to continue to support MySQL after the promised 5 years.

FireBug Console Improved

The firebug console no longer clears when you load a new page in a tab. Instead it keeps a running collection of all request, errors, and debug statements made inside of the current tab. This can be annoying as your console window will quickly fill up with requests (youll need to use clear&rsquot; more judiciously), but is actually very helpful when debugging requests firing at page unload.

MattSnider.com 2009-2010

This past year has seen some great articles (the most popular being CSS String Truncation with Ellipsis; thanks Justin), a site redesign (goodbye wordpress), improved commenting system (yeah JS-Kit), great tools (YUI Storage), and a whole lot more. Thanks to everyone who contributed and commented throughout the year, I hope to see more reader participation in 2010.

In 2010, I plan to continue writing 1 to 2 aritcles a week and finish the site redesign. Mostly this revolves around adding: search, a YUI 3 based JavaScript layer, customizable site options, and AJAXifying whatever requests I can. Additionally, I will be improving the way articles are organized to provide directed lessons for readers teaching themselves about JavaScript and Web Application Development.

Outside of the blog: I will continue to support the YUI library, including improving YUI Storage and migrating it to YUI 3; write a YUI 2.X cookbook; improve Mint.com and attempt to influence UI developers at Intuit; speak at more conferences; and climb at least one more 13,000+ mountain.

Cheers everyone, have a great year end, and may next year better than the last.